Young: History shows politics has room for moderates

Partisanship once used as a negotiating tool, not an endgame

By Nancy Young |
October 15, 2013
| Updated: October 15, 2013 6:42pm

We like to think that bipartisanship is dead in Washington, D.C. - deader than ever in history. We also like to think that partisanship prevents compromise. Some of us even think moderates have no place in American politics. But that's not so.

Seventy years ago the country was in the middle of a worldwide war with an unsure outcome. Then, as now, war fatigue was rampant and lawmakers faced difficult decisions about the economy. Then, as now, politicians divided over the importance of funding a welfare state, be it the New Deal or Obamacare.

Because we like to think of World War II as the "Good War," we believe it has no lessons to teach about ideological conflict and bipartisan compromise. Yet, a New York Times headline suggests otherwise.

"Congress Rebels: President Is Defeated." Change the dateline from the summer of 1943 to October 2013, and everything else can remain the same. For most of the early 1940s, open warfare between liberals and conservatives and Congress and the White House dominated national politics.

In the fall of 1942, Sen. Robert Taft, R-Ohio, complained, "I regret that the president has yielded to advisers who have so little respect for the Constitution."

Much as with today's negotiations over deficit spending and the budget, President Franklin D. Roosevelt suggested inaction about economic policy would have terrible repercussions for the national economy.

When Congress was slow to comply, the president blasted lawmakers. House Speaker Sam Rayburn, D-Texas, who described himself as a "progressive conservative or a conservative progressive," groused, "He's getting just about what he wants. And then he kicks us this way."

Another lawmaker, Rep. Jesse Wolcott, R-Mich., said the president "can go to hell. That's what we ought to tell him."

It is tempting to sigh and say things have always been dysfunctional … but we would miss the point.

Then, verbal fulminations were just that; they were not predictive of legislative outcomes.

Indeed, Taft, Rayburn and Wolcott often supported administration policy. Rayburn met regularly with Roosevelt in his White House bedroom to plot strategy. Taft, notorious for his conservatism, voted with the administration on wartime economic policy.

Wolcott worked closely with Democrats to protect wartime price controls and the New Deal regulatory economy.

Partisanship ran amok in the 1940s, as it does today, but then moderates in Congress and the White House compromised for the sake of governing.

Lawmakers in the 1940s used partisanship as a negotiating tool, not as an endgame electoral strategy to prove "ideological purity" to a small constituency of voters.

Were it possible, here is the advice lawmakers from the 1940s would give to members of the House and the Senate today. Speaker Rayburn would say to House Speaker John Boehner and Tea Party Republicans, "Any jackass can kick a barn down, but it takes a good carpenter to build one." Rayburn believed country came before party. "The people's business," he urged, trumps all other concerns.

The contentious but effective working relationship between World War II lawmakers and Roosevelt matters far more than the fiction of a harmonious, good war. The president and Congress cooperated and negotiated, even when they were fighting and cussing one another. They benefited from the full range of ideological views being present in both political parties.

Today we struggle because there are too few moderates in Congress who are able to cut deals with the ideologues on the two ends of the political spectrum. Today, the liberal ideologues are all in the Democratic Party and the conservative ideologues are all in the Republican Party. In the 1940s, and indeed for much of the 20th century, ideological range characterized each party.

We overlook these lessons at our own peril. We are largely ignorant of the tremendous partisan squabbling in the WW II-era congresses, leaving us equally unaware of how moderates wielded power, tamed the bile and achieved results - results that positioned the United States to win World War II and secure two decades of staggering economic growth and prosperity.